AI agents are starting to read websites the way browsers read them. They fetch a file, parse structured data, call a tool. If your site does not answer in a form they can use, they move on — and you never find out why. citelayer® makes your WordPress site readable and usable for those agents, and te
PricingFree downloadThe WordPress.org download is free. Pro versions, add-ons or external services may cost extra.
CompatibilityRequires WordPress 6.4 and PHP 7.4.
SourceWordPress plugins · Nov 10, 2026
01 / Source details
Aboutthistool.
AI agents are starting to read websites the way browsers read them. They fetch a file, parse structured data, call a tool. If your site does not answer in a form they can use, they move on — and you never find out why.
citelayer® makes your WordPress site readable and usable for those agents, and tells you when something stops working. No coding, no configuration. Install, activate, done.
🔌 Works with AI Agents via MCP
citelayer® brings nine abilities to the WordPress Abilities API — seven of them registered out of the box, the two writing ones after you allow them (see below). Any MCP client that speaks to your site through the official WordPress MCP Adapter can then read your citelayer data instead of you copying it out of the dashboard by hand, and can run the two routine tasks below for you.
Seven abilities only read:
citelayer/get-readiness-score — the cached AI readiness score with every check
citelayer/get-llms-txt-status — llms.txt state, URL, listed and excluded posts
citelayer/get-bot-analytics — aggregated AI crawler traffic for 7, 30 or 90 days
citelayer/get-ai-blind-spots — published pages no AI bot visited
citelayer/get-referral-stats — visits arriving from AI assistants, by source
citelayer/get-schema-status — active Schema.org types and site identity completeness
citelayer/get-compatibility-status — detected SEO plugins and MCP availability
Two abilities change something:
citelayer/run-readiness-scan — runs the AI readiness checks and stores the result
citelayer/set-llms-txt-exclusion — includes a single post in llms.txt or holds it back
The two writing abilities are switched off out of the box. A new install and an update both start in Read-only mode : the seven reading abilities are available right away, the two writing ones do not appear in the client’s tool list at all, and a call that still arrives is refused. No update makes your site writable for an AI agent without you deciding so. To allow them, turn Read-only mode off under citelayer® → WebMCP .
Every ability requires an administrator account ( manage_options ), and the exclusion additionally requires the right to edit that particular post. The permission is checked twice: once before the call and once inside the ability itself, so a plugin that reaches the abilities through another route cannot skip it. Returns are aggregated: no IP addresses, no user agents, no e-mail addresses, no identity values.
The feature needs WordPress 6.9 or newer, since that is when the Abilities API landed in core. On older WordPress versions nothing is registered and nothing changes. citelayer® does not ship an MCP server of its own — transport is the adapter’s job — and you can switch all abilities off on the same page.
This exposes existing citelayer® data to tools you connect yourself. It does not influence whether or how AI systems cite your site.
🩺 Diagnosis — Find Out When It Breaks
Agent readiness is not a one-time setup. A caching layer, a server rule, another plugin or a stray static file can take an endpoint over from one day to the next, and nothing in the WordPress admin would tell you. citelayer® checks its own output and reports what it finds:
Endpoint diagnosis — calls /llms.txt , /llms-full.txt and the Markdown routes the way an agent would, and compares the answer with what citelayer® generates internally. It tells apart a static file shadowing the route, an SEO plugin serving it with citelayer® additions merged in, a third generator, and a missing charset=utf-8 — so you get a cause, not just a red light
AI Readiness Scanner — ten checks with a score from 0 to 100, covering structured data, robots rules, Content-Signal headers, topic coverage, brand demand and, on shops, product content, images, stock and feed. The llms.txt endpoint is checked too, but not scored — see below
AI Blind Spots — published pages no AI bot has visited, so you can see which content never reached an agent at all
Compatibility status — which SEO plugin owns which output, and whether citelayer® merges into it or generates its own
🤖 AI Bot Analytics — Know Who’s Crawling Your Site
Track automated AI crawler requests and human AI referral visits separately. See which AI platforms send actual users to your site, and watch the bot traffic that’s discovering your content for those platforms.
67 AI/LLM Bots Tracked — GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, DeepSeekBot, xAI-Bot, Meta-ExternalAgent, and 60 more
Real-Time Dashboard — Stat cards (7d/30d/90d/all-time), 30-day SVG trend chart, top bots leaderboard
AI Blind Spots — Discover pages invisible to AI bots with AI Discovery Score (0-100). Find and fix content gaps
Crawler Logs — Full log with filtering by bot, URL path, and date range. Paginated for large datasets
CSV Export — Download your bot data for offline analysis
Cache Plugin Detection — Auto-detects WP Rocket, LiteSpeed, W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache. Provides setup guides to exclude AI bots from caching
90-Day Auto-Cleanup — Keeps your database lean. No bloat, no maintenance
100% Local — All data stored in your WordPress database. No external accounts, no API calls
📊 Schema.org — Structured Data That Supports the Rest
Automatically generates JSON-LD for your organization, site, articles and products, so an agent parsing your page finds the facts it needs in a form it already understands. Schema.org is supporting work here, not the centrepiece: citelayer® detects Yoast SEO, Rank Math and All in One SEO and merges its data into their markup instead of emitting a second block. If an SEO plugin is installed but not set up and produces nothing, citelayer® notices and supplies the markup itself.
📄 Serve Clean Content to AI Agents
When ChatGPT or Perplexity visit your page, citelayer® serves an optimized Markdown version instead of messy HTML. This uses 80% fewer tokens and gives AI a crystal-clear picture of your content.
🕒 Content Freshness
On a published post or page, citelayer® adds article:modified_time Open Graph metadata when a supported SEO plugin does not already provide it. The date describes the queried post or page. citelayer® does not set an HTTP Last-Modified header for generated HTML: the page can also include newer posts, menus or other content that changes without an edit to the queried post. The existing freshness option controls citelayer’s Open Graph output; other plugins, servers and caches manage their own HTTP validators.
🛡️ Stay in Control of Your Content
Configure how AI systems may use your content — allow or deny training, search indexing, and RAG/context usage. Your content, your rules.
🛒 Works with WooCommerce
If you run a shop, citelayer® makes your products visible to AI:
Product Schema.org markup generated
Product pages served as structured Markdown tables
AI agents can discover available shop capability status via UCP Discovery
Product data also listed in llms.txt
📄 llms.txt
citelayer® also generates an llms.txt (and optionally an llms-full.txt), the proposed convention for pointing AI systems at your content.
Be aware of what this is worth today. A study across 300,000 domains found no statistically significant difference in AI citation frequency between sites with and without llms.txt, and an analysis of 94,614 cited URLs found exactly one that pointed at a /llms.txt. citelayer® offers the file because the cost is near zero and the convention may still establish itself — not because it is known to have an effect. That is also why the AI Readiness Score no longer counts it at all — the check still runs and still shows you its status, it just does not move the number. The measurable parts of this plugin are the ones above.
📈 Why AI Visibility Matters Now
58% of online searches will involve AI by the end of 2026
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) and Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) are the next evolution of SEO
Sites without AI-readable content are invisible to ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and AI Overviews
citelayer® covers the readable side — the files, the markup, the abilities — and tells you when one of them stops working
✅ Free vs. Premium
The free plugin covers everything you need to get started:
✅ MCP abilities for the WordPress Abilities API (read-only out of the box) ✅ Endpoint diagnosis and AI Readiness Scanner with Topic Coverage and Brand Demand signal guidance ✅ Schema.org markup (Organization, WebSite, Article, Product) ✅ Markdown for AI agents ✅ Content-Signal headers ✅ WooCommerce product visibility in Schema.org, Markdown, and llms.txt ✅ llms.txt generation ✅ AI Bot Analytics (67 bots, dashboard, AI Blind Spots, CSV export) ✅ AI Referral Tracking (Visits from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, DeepSeek, Mistral, Grok, and more) ✅ Cache plugin detection & setup guides
Premium adds:
🚀 WooCommerce add-on support for AI product discovery and controlled cart/checkout handoff 📈 AI Visibility Monitoring Dashboard 🔧 Advanced Schema.org (Reviews, FAQ, Shipping) 🛒 Product feed optimization
Full autonomous UCP shopping support is planned separately and is not claimed by the free plugin.
Learn more about Premium →
Get your AI Audit citelayer® offers thorough AI Visibility Audits as a Service. We help you become visible
02 / Source details
Gettingstarted.
01Upload the plugin files to /wp-content/plugins/citelayer/ or install via WordPress plugin installer
02Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
03Go to citelayer → Dashboard in your admin sidebar to explore all features
04Visit /llms.txt on your site to verify output
05Check citelayer → Bot Analytics to see AI crawler activity (data appears automatically)
03 / Source details
Frequently asked questions.
Do I need technical knowledge to use this?
No. Install the plugin, activate it, and it works immediately. Bot tracking starts automatically in the background. There are optional settings if you want to fine-tune, but the defaults work great for most sites.
Will this help my site rank better in Google?
Yes! The Schema.org markup improves how search engines understand your content. Plus, as Google integrates more AI into search results (AI Overviews), having AI-readable content helps you appear in those new formats. citelayer® detects Yoast SEO and Rank Math to avoid duplicate Schema.
What is llms.txt, and is it worth anything?
llms.txt is a proposed convention, loosely modelled on robots.txt, for telling AI systems what a site is about and where its content lives. citelayer® generates one.
Honest answer on its value: the available studies find no effect. Across 300,000 domains there was no statistically significant difference in AI citation frequency between sites with and without the file, and in an analysis of 94,614 URLs cited by AI systems exactly one pointed at a /llms.txt. Treat it as a cheap bet on a convention that may still establish itself, not as something that gets you read today. The parts of this plugin you can actually measure are the MCP abilities, the structured data and the diagnosis.
How does Bot Analytics work?
citelayer® checks every incoming request against 62 known AI/LLM bot User-Agent strings. When a match is found, the visit is logged to a custom database table with timestamp, bot name, category, and URL path. This runs silently in the background — no configuration needed.
What are AI Blind Spots?
AI Blind Spots shows you pages on your site that have NOT been visited by any AI bot within a selected time period (7/30/90/365 days). Each page gets an AI Discovery Score (0-100) based on content length, title quality, excerpt, featured image, and age. Low scores indicate pages that need optimization.
Which AI bots does citelayer® track?
citelayer® tracks 67 AI/LLM bots from major providers:
xAI / DeepSeek / Mistral / Amazon / Cohere / HuggingFace and many more
Will this slow down my site?
Not at all. Bot detection adds less than 0.01 seconds per request. Dashboard stats are cached (5-minute transients). Everything else is aggressively cached — llms.txt refreshes every 24 hours, Schema every 7 days. AI-specific features only activate when an AI agent visits, not for regular users.
Does citelayer® track human visitors?
Bot Analytics logs identified AI/LLM bot requests. The AI Referrals tab also stores a minimal local event when a browser arrives with a known AI referrer or utm_source ; this is used only to show AI click-through visits in your WordPress database. No external telemetry, accounts, or profiling are used.
What is GEO / AEO?
GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) and AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) are the next evolution of SEO. Instead of optimizing for Google’s blue links, you optimize for AI-generated answers. citelayer® handles the technical foundation so your content can appear in AI responses.
Can I control how AI uses my content?
Yes. citelayer® supports Content-Signal headers (contentsignals.org) that let you set rules: * Allow or deny AI training on your content * Allow or deny search indexing * Allow or deny use in AI responses (RAG)
Default: Training denied, search and AI responses allowed.
What is UCP?
UCP (Universal Commerce Protocol) is an emerging commerce protocol for helping AI agents discover product and shop capabilities. The free plugin exposes discovery data; paid commerce add-ons can add product discovery and controlled cart/checkout handoff when enabled. Full autonomous UCP shopping support is planned separately and is not claimed by the free plugin.
Does citelayer® work with caching plugins?
Yes! Bot detection happens at the WordPress level before page caching. The Cache Config tab in Bot Analytics auto-detects WP Rocket, LiteSpeed Cache, W3 Total Cache, and WP Super Cache — and shows you exactly how to exclude AI bots from your cache for better tracking accuracy.
What happens to old bot data?
A daily cron job automatically deletes bot visit records older than 90 days to prevent database bloat. This is configurable via the citelayer_bot_analytics_cleanup_days filter.
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